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The 2009 global recession had left Chrysler and General Motors fighting for their corporate lives. If the big auto companies went under, thousands of well-paying auto jobs would be wiped out. The ripple effects would hit suppliers and communities, aggravating an already deep economic slump.

On the table was a proposal to pump billions of taxpayer dollars into the two companies — tough to swallow for a Conservative government that campaigned against picking corporate winners and losers.

Yet those involved in the decision say the Canadian government had no choice. In Washington, Barack Obama’s administration had already signalled it would provide financial support to GM and Chrysler’s U.S. operations. There was a risk their Canadian operations would simply head south.

“The truth is, it’s not what we wanted to do. It was a defensive reaction to President Obama going ahead and bailing out Chrysler and GM. If Canada was going to be a part of the North American auto supply then we had to pick up our proportionate share,” said a key insider of the government of the day, who agreed to speak only on background even years later because of political sensitivities that still linger.

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“We were, in effect, backed into it and we did it. There was real pushback and blowback obviously with the party, the caucus, the cabinet. It was far from unanimous,” he recalled Monday. “It was a North American effort to save a North American industry.”

He said the automakers have been looking to get out of Canada “for a long time,” to shift operations to lower cost locales. “Had we not done the bailout, they would have used (that) as an excuse to get out then,” the insider said.

Harper has lamented that, on his 50th birthday, he bought shares in the two auto companies in the biggest bailout in Canadian history.

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“It was not pleasant,” Harper wrote in a book published this fall. He defended the decision, however, saying that it was an essentially populist move and sound economic policy to save up to half a million jobs that were at risk had the Canadian auto industry shuttered and moved south of the border.

“Conservatism is not, at its core, about markets. It is about making an economy work. Markets will generally do that. But when they do not, as a conservative, you do what will work,” wrote Harper in Right Here, Right Now.

Did Canada throw good money after bad, in light of GM’s announcement that it will end production at its Oshawa plant, affecting some 2,500 jobs?

If it was a mistake in hindsight for a Conservative government to spend $13.7 billion to bail out General Motors and Chrysler, the Liberal government of today isn’t saying.

On Monday, Navdeep Bains, the federal minister of innovation, science and economic development, defended the decision by a then-Conservative government and a then-Liberal provincial government in Ontario, to join the U.S. in a “too big to fail” corporate rescue package.

“In 2008-2009, we realized the situation at that time was very dire. The previous government, the Conservative government, had made significant investment. This is not only about the autoworkers, but this has to do with suppliers and dealers and the impact this has. Like I said, 500,000 jobs are connected to the automotive sector, both direct and indirect. And so we’re going to continue to support and defend the automotive sector and the automotive workers.”

Still, Bains admitted that after months of trying to pin down GM’s executives on their future plans for the Oshawa plant, he was “personally very hurt” by the surprise news Sunday that the company would close the Oshawa plant’s operations next year, shutting three assembly lines and turfing nearly 2,500 employees.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer was asked Monday if the Liberal government — which he criticized for being reckless spenders — should look at another bailout. He declined to answer directly, saying only that all options must be looked at during an emergency parliamentary debate.

A 2014 federal auditor general’s report examined the bailout to General Motors and Chrysler, which saw the governments of Canada and Ontario lend GM a total of $10.8 billion.

One of the conditions, said the auditor general, was that over a certain period, the companies would maintain production volumes in Canada that were proportionate to those of the three NAFTA countries.

Other conditions included concessions to be made by unionized labour, suppliers, and dealerships on the companies’ costs or long-term viability. But the auditor found Canada had limited information at the time on what those would be.

Also as part of the financial assistance to GM, $1 billion was set aside for reducing health-care liabilities and $4 billion for reducing its pension deficits.

The Canadian Taxypayers’ Federation said that after accounting for the sale of stock and repayments, the bailout cost Queen’s Park and Ottawa about $3.7 billion.

Economist Jeff Rubin said it’s fair for taxpayers to question the value of that bailout in light of GM’s Monday announcement.

“I think it’s clear that without the support of taxpayers ... GM would not exist today,” said Rubin, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

He said at the time, the goal of the GM bailout was to keep alive a company that was key to the manufacturing sectors in both countries. “The notion was that this was helping it through extraordinary circumstances for a long-run return. ‘Long run’ meant more than 10 years,” Rubin said in an interview.

He also said the GM move “makes a mockery” of Canadian efforts to defend the auto sector in the negotiations for a North American trade deal. “These are precisely the middle-class jobs that the Trudeau administration said free trade was going to protect,” Rubin said.

Dennis Desrosiers, president of Desrosiers Automotive Consultants, said GM’s Canadian workers and their union are not to blame for GM’s decision to close because productivity there is no longer an issue — an upshot of the bailout package.

“Much if not all of the issues related to uncompetitive labour costs were worked through with the near-bankruptcy in Canada back almost a decade ago. If productivity and/or quality measures for Oshawa was (sic) in the public domain, I suspect Oshawa would show very well,” Desrosiers said.

“Can this be saved? Probably not. But it is still worth the fight to try to get something out of this,” he added. “We might not be able to save these jobs but GM is a very large company with a lot of economic clout and having a backbone on this issue might help us in the future.”

The United Steelworkers of Canada said the company’s decision to shut down its Oshawa operations comes on the heels of the corporation’s report of a $2.5-billion, third-quarter profit.

Marty Warren, USW Ontario and Atlantic Canada director, slammed GM. The company “which benefited from massive subsidies from Canadian taxpayers following the 2009 economic crisis, said last fall it did not expect job losses from its strategy of expansion in the electric vehicle market,” Warren said in a news release.

“GM workers in Oshawa have more than fulfilled their end of the bargain. They have made numerous sacrifices and compromises over the years. They have increased productivity and produced the highest-quality vehicles,” he said.

“Liberal and Conservative governments have spent billions of taxpayers’ dollars — with no meaningful job guarantees — to subsidize multinationals such as General Motors, yet these corporations continue to eliminate Canadian jobs and shift production out of the country,” Warren added.

“Where does it end? When will our governments say, ‘Enough is enough?’”

Bruce Campion-Smith is an Ottawa-based reporter covering national politics. Follow him on Twitter: @yowflier

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